The Three Brontes Part 15

Their feet are dyed in a darker tide, Who dare those dangers drear.

Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s have burst through the battle's worst, And why should they tremble here?

"Now, my brave men, this one pa.s.s more, This narrow chasm of stone, And Douglas for our sovereign's gore Shall yield us back his own."

I hear their ever-rising tread Sound through the granite glen; There is a tall pine overhead Held by the mountain men.

That dizzy bridge which no horse could track Has checked the outlaw's way; There like a wild beast turns he back, And grimly stands at bay.

Why smiles he so, when far below He spies the toiling chase?

The pond'rous tree swings heavily, And totters from its place.

They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies Are lost in sudden shade: But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies, He need not fear the dead.

[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208.]

[Footnote B: I have removed the t.i.tle from the preceding fragment to the ballad to which it obviously belongs.]

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Bronte whom Charlotte edited. And there is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strange exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of the forms we recognize as hers:

G.o.ds of the old mythology Arise in gloom and storm; Adramalec, bow down thy head, Reveal, dark fiend, thy form.

The giant sons of Anakim Bowed lowest at thy shrine, And thy temple rose in Argola, With its hallowed groves of vine; And there was eastern incense burnt, And there were garments spread, With the fine gold decked and broidered, And tinged with radiant red, With the radiant red of furnace flames That through the shadows shone As the full moon when on Sinai's top Her rising light is thrown.

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Bronte that I should not be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least one rea.s.suring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ring of the Brontesque.

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:

No; though the soil be wet with tears, How fair so'er it grew, The vital sap once perished Will never flow again; _And surer than that dwelling dread, The narrow dungeon of the dead, Time parts the hearts of men._

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:

In plundered churches piled with dead The heavy charger neighed for food, The wounded soldier laid his head 'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.

Again, she has a vision:

In all the hours of gloom My soul was rapt away.

I stood by a marble tomb Where royal corpses lay.

A frightful thing appears to her, "a shadowy thing, most dim":

And still it bent above, Its features still in view; _It seemed close by; and yet more far Than this world from the farthest star That tracks the boundless blue._

Indeed 'twas not the s.p.a.ce Of earth or time between, But the sea of deep eternity, The gulf o'er which mortality Has never, never been.

The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. And here is the first sketch or germ of "The Old Stoic":

Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, _I ask for nothing further here Than my own heart and liberty._

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism:

There was a time when my cheek burned To give such scornful words the lie, Ungoverned nature madly spurned The law that bade it not defy.

Oh, in the days of ardent youth I would have given my life for truth.

For truth, for right, for liberty, I would have gladly, freely died; And now I calmly bear and see The vain man smile, the fool deride, Though not because my heart is tame, Though not for fear, though not for shame.

My soul still chokes at every tone Of selfish and self-clouded error; My breast still braves the world alone, Steeled as it ever was to terror.

Only I know, howe'er I frown, The same world will go rolling on.

October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Bronte, of her resources and her range.

But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed.

He might have picked out of the ma.s.s wherein they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a t.i.tanic epic. He might have done something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Bronte, for at least eleven years, lived and moved and had her being.

Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was possible to ignore the "Gondal Chronicles". They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter's exhaustive list of early and unpublished ma.n.u.scripts. n.o.body knew anything about them except that they were part of a mysterious game of make-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne played together, long after the age when most of us have given up make-believing. There are several references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily and Anne. Emily writes in 1841: "The Gondaland are at present in a threatening state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All the princes and princesses of the Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction." Anne wonders "whether the Gondaland will still be flouris.h.i.+ng" in 1845. In 1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long journey together. "And during our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard pressed at present by the victorious Republicans. "The Gondals," Emily says, "still flourish bright as ever." Anne is not so sure. "We have not yet finished our 'Gondal Chronicles' that we began three years and a half ago. When will they be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicans are uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of Instruction. The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we have not played at them much yet."

But there are no recognizable references to the Gondal poems. It is not certain whether Charlotte Bronte knew of their existence, not absolutely certain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew.

"Bronte specialists" are agreed in dismissing the Chronicles as puerile.

But the poems cannot be so dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, vehement, and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains some of Emily Bronte's very finest verse. They are obscure, incoherent sometimes, because they are fragmentary; even poems apparently complete in themselves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and complicated epic drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we can arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken as they are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago". These songs and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives but that mysterious, resurgent memory.

The forms that move through these battles are obscure. You can pick out many of the Gondal poems by the recurring names of heroes and of lands.

But where there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you it is not easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal poems and which are not.

But after careful examination and comparison you can make out at least eighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten doubtful.

All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the love songs, belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the poems of eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems.

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that haunted Emily Bronte, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place of "The Two Children", and "The Wanderer from the Fold", which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty.

It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems of eighteen-forty-six: "The Outcast Mother", "A Death-Scene", and "Honour's Martyr".

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature could interest a single human being; which is why n.o.body, so far as I know, has pursued it. And the placing of those four poems in the obscure Gondal legend would have nothing but "a bibliographical interest" were it not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of the legend. And the main track of the legend brings you straight to the courses of _Wuthering Heights_ and of the love poems.

The sources of _Wuthering Heights_ have been the dream and the despair of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the _Tales of Hoffmann_. And "Remembrance", one of the most pa.s.sionate love poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that Emily Bronte had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.

But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legend without any violence to its mystery.

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous pa.s.sion, a woman's pa.s.sion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero like him is "Honour's Martyr".

To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name, And Hate will trample me, Will load me with a coward's shame-- A traitor's perjury.

False friends will launch their covert sneers True friends will wish me dead; And I shall cause the bitterest tears That you have ever shed.

Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.